What happens when visual arts and agriculture come together?

Handmade paper is born!

At least this is what happened to Natan Kaaren many years ago, in the early 80s, listening to a radio program while living on Kibbutz Sde Yoav in Israel. He realized that recycling leftovers of his farming activity would bring back art into his life. For many years to come he would experiment with so many different plant fibers

- among them wheat straw, grass, banana, papyrus, corn, kozo (Japanese mulberry) and the very special mitnan, a desert plant. 

His papermaking studio, with self-built equipment (and a big kozo forest grown around it), would attract many paper lovers, would teach artists and non alike, provide them with profound paper knowledge, in particular about fiber preparation. Then and now, passion of the trade was/is the constant company of all paper works and lectures shared with you, visitors!

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It was again handmade paper, mitnan in particular, which sparked the interest of Catharina Sonn Kaaren in the early 90s, in a different setting: in the big Hamburg University library she opened a volume which showed a variety of paper samples, handmade all over the world, marking the beginning of her paper voyage.

A few years later she would meet Natan on a paper congress (check out IAPMA!) in Holland, and learn that the very special desert paper she had seen and felt in the sample book, had been made by Joyce Schmidt, teacher of Natan and the very same radio guest which had ignited his love for paper. 

25 years later, their shared paper journey continues...

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